By Scott A. Grant
mail@floridanewsline.com
In the early days of the National Football League, back when professional football was still frowned upon and seen as ungentlemanly, Jacksonville briefly had its own team. There was a wild west atmosphere to the league in those days. New teams joined, old teams folded, and teams regularly moved. The league champion was picked each year using a complicated formula. In 1925, the Chicago Cardinals and the Pottsville Maroons both claimed the title. The Cardinals went on to play in St. Louis and then in Arizona. The Maroons, who played for the city where Yuengling Beer was brewed, faded from the league a few years later.
Late in the 1925 college football season, a player named Red Grange, “The Galloping Ghost,” completed a successful season for the University of Illinois with an upset victory over Ohio State. Grange was featured on the cover of Time magazine and he immediately cashed in on his celebrity by leaving school and signing a huge contract with the Chicago Bears. He also signed a contract with a former Yale star to play in a league in Florida during the winter. The league never took off, but Grange did play a series of exhibition games with his new club, the Bears, that began in Florida.
One of the teams that Grange and his Bears would face was the Jacksonville All-Stars. The All-Stars were built around another collegiate sensation, Ernie Nevers of Stanford. The original plan was to have the two teams barnstorm the country. That plan also fell through. Nevers was offered a $50,000 contract and received at least half of that. The rest of the All Stars were mostly local college players and included some from the nearby University of Florida. The team also featured former Georgia Tech star, Red Barron, which is a pretty cool name.
Twenty years before the first Gator Bowl and almost a decade before Wayne Weaver, founding owner of the Jaguars, was born, Jacksonville saw its first professional football game on Jan. 2, 1926. The game was played at Fairfield Stadium, a small stadium that occupied the same space as the future Gator Bowl and the current EverBank Field. Fairfield would survive to host the first two Gator Bowl games in 1946 and 1947. The field got its name because the land had once hosted the State Fair. Fairfield was small with a capacity of just more than 7,500 people, so carpenters were called in to construct additional grandstands to house the expected crowd.
Like so much to do with the planned tour, the crowd did not materialize either. Only 6,700 fans were willing to pay to see the game. Tickets were overpriced to try and compensate for the salaries of Grange and Nevers. The Bears won the game 19 – 6 and the local press declared the game a lackluster disappointment. The All Stars’ only score came late in the game on a touchdown run by Nevers from the five-yard line. Grange managed two completed passes, one for a score.
A week later, the New York Giants showed up to play a second game against Nevers and his All-Stars. It would prove to be the last professional football game played in Jacksonville for nearly 50 years. Nevers had to leave the game at halftime with strained ligaments in his back and the Giants won 6 – 0 before an even smaller crowd. The Jacksonville Journal would comment wryly, “Professional football came and departed from Jacksonville … failing to create much interest …”
Red Grange went on to play for various teams over the next 10 years, including the Bears and the New York Football Yankees of the AFL. (A different AFL than the one that became famous in the 1960s.) Nevers played for the Duluth Eskimos and then later the Chicago Cardinals. In 1929, he set a football record by scoring six touchdowns in a single game. The record was later tied by Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears and others. but Nevers also kicked four extra points in that game — giving him a total of 40 points scored and that is still the record. Too bad he did not do it in Jacksonville.
Scott A. Grant is a local author and historian. He often likes to tell local sports stories. By day he is the principal owner at Standfast Asset Management. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com.
